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You are here: Home / 6 - Culture / Technology / How to Add Page Numbers to Your Microsoft Word for Mac Template

How to Add Page Numbers to Your Microsoft Word for Mac Template

March 31, 2010 by Matt Perman

It’s usually a bad idea not to include page numbers on multi-page documents. Adding them manually to every document, however, creates an extra step that is better removed by making page numbers a default part of the template. However, if you are on a Mac and use Microsoft Word for Mac, it is hard to figure out how to make the template automatically include them.

I finally looked in to how to do this, and found a forum that contains a solution that works.

First, here’s a more detailed statement of the problem, which explains the very complication that I used to run into whenever I would try this before:

I am using Word 2008 for Mac. I always want page numbers, but I always need to select it from the Insert menu. Is there a way to make this the default so I don’t have to manually select it every time? I have tried this: See the Word help topic ” Template locations in Word” for more information, which says to edit the Normal template and add them there: they will then appear in every new document I create. But this doesn’t seem to help. When I open the Normal.dotm file, it appears as Document 1, so I can’t actually change Normal.dotm. I can make a new Page Numbers doc but I’ll have to select it to use it. How do I make a default Normal, or how can I get Page Numbers to open as the default?

Here’s the solution that was proposed:

Open Word, New document, select File Open. Navigate to where normal.dotm is located: /Users/you/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/normal.dotm

Open it and make the changes to it that you desire. Save normal.dotm, save all, and close Word. Open Word again and the changes you made should be reflected as part of the normal template. The old normal template will be renamed and saved in the same location as a backup.

Now I can add: that solution works.

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Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

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